300 words: Fewer, better notifications

One of my focuses for this year is to reduce my anxiety levels. I wouldn’t class them as out of control, but I do have periods where they’re concerning.

I spent a little time recently looking at what triggers anxiety for me. Although I came up with a fair list, the reasons I see as simplest to deal with are ‘fear of missing out’ and feeling overwhelmed.

It doesn’t take much imagination to quickly link these two triggers back to mobile phone notifications and app badge counters.

For me the obvious change to make is reduce the triggers in terms of quantity and invasiveness.

On the other side of the fence are mobile applications who’s very life-blood is to regularly pull you back into their world. The reasons aren’t always sound, and when you accept notifications for those apps, you don’t know how vague those reasons will be.

Will allowing notifications mean you’re alerted to triggers purely designed to draw you back into the app?

The only notifications I want. to receive are those which are time sensitive and genuinely important.

I use my phone enough that just displaying an app badge can be enough to show me there is something to be aware of. I don’t need anything to pop-up on my phone or in my notification feed.

So I’ve essentially had a cull of all the apps I never want to hear from. Adobe are allowed app badges, but many are not. Those who can send me notifications are under review. If an app abuses the permissions I’ve allowed it, I just remove them.

Very few notifications I was was seeing were something I couldn’t do without. Monitoring of banking and web services are possibly the only exception.

Initially it was a strange calm. Now it feels like a pleasing silence.